Mr. Schnabel’s film is groundbreaking in its rendering of that interior life.

| Apr 21, 2023

The movie's overwhelming achievement is its evocation of a life and events without wallowing in any kind of pity or histrionic melodrama.

| Mar 22, 2021

Never stoops to audience manipulation, it simply presents the story in a simple, heartfelt way and allows the viewer to follow their own feelings rather than have the filmmaker try to tell them how they should be reacting.

| Original Score: 3.5/5 | Jan 31, 2021

About as stunning and moving as a film can get.

| Original Score: 10/10 | Nov 24, 2020

Is not only fascinating, it's a great movie. [Full review in Spanish]

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Oct 15, 2020

About the life of one man whose imagination took flight even when his body could not follow.

| Original Score: 4.0/4.0 | Sep 6, 2020

A work of art. A celebration of life and hope. A testament to the human mind.

| Nov 7, 2019

One of the most visually original films in recent memory, and one that features just as much substance as style.

| Original Score: A- | Oct 29, 2019

Its flow of memory and imagination transforms the hero's nightmare into a dream, where a glance at the radiance of sunlight in a curtain is an elemental vision of what it means to be alive.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Oct 25, 2019

Films like this are rare - movies that celebrate what is best in humanity in a powerful and moving way, that deserve to be seen and remembered.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Jun 6, 2019

A masterfully structured narrative: the story bounces organically and sensuously around various players and memories in Bauby's life.

| Original Score: 3/5 | Feb 1, 2019

It is a film that presents a nightmarish and almost unbearable medical case history that has been handled with humor, a lyrical deftness, and a remarkable absence of sentimentality...

| Aug 23, 2018

Julian Schnabel's first film since Before Night Falls is a gorgeous, canny, and sensual adaptation of a most unlikely story.

| Aug 22, 2017

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 18, 2011

Full Review | Original Score: 3/5 | Nov 17, 2011

An inventive, challenging, at times emotionally bracing film, audaciously staged and laudably anti-clichéd in its character particulars, yet destined to be more admired than beloved.

| Apr 28, 2011

Julian Schnabel and cinematographer Janusz Kaminski fundamentally retool the template for the biopic to create one of the greatest portrayals of the mind's eye ever put to film. A discomforting but inspiring struggle for one enduring, final expression.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Sep 25, 2010

This uncommon story about an uncommon man is gentle, it is patient, it is compassionate and -- from a technical standpoint -- it is stunning.

Full Review | Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 9, 2009

Triumph of the human spirit to the Miramax, predictable in its crowd-pleasing, middlebrow vulgarity but with a few inventive, free-floating passages

| Aug 27, 2009

[Schnabel is] drawn to the plight of the imagination struggling against limits, and Bauby's Beckett-like extremity has inspired his best film to date and the best film of the year.

| Original Score: 4/4 | Apr 23, 2009